“Go,” Mike said. “We have to get to Shizoko in Austin, and it’s still seven hours away. God knows how many people they’re going to put on us now.”
Leon pushed the Caddy up to ninety, but it started to shudder. The crash must have done something to it. He slowed down to eighty. His body hurt all over and he was exhausted. And Mike was in no shape to drive. They couldn’t go on this way. “We have to call someone,” he said to Mike. “We need help.”
“Who? The Institute is shut down.”
“The police.”
“We’re in the middle of fucking nowhere. Do you think the police out here will be friendly to two guys from DC? Us? This is where the anti-AI extremists come from.” Mike shook his head. “We’re on our own.”
Leon looked around. Nothing but two-lane blacktop in any direction as far as the eye could see. Just grass and scrub trees on flatlands, like the last five hundred miles. He didn’t think anything came from around here.
“What if we find an airport or something?” Leon asked. Noting the setting sun, he pulled the switch to turn the lights on, as he’d seen Mike do. Sparks shot out of the hood, and the whine of the motor disappeared. Suddenly they were coasting without power.
“What did you do?” Mike asked.
Leon guided the car toward the side of the road. “Nothing. I just turned on the headlights.”
“Turn them off.”
Leon complied. He was tired of being told what to do, but he pushed the switch in. The motor engaged again and the Caddy started to accelerate.
“What the hell?” he said.
“Pull over,” Mike told him.
“Stop telling me what to do!”
Mike looked at him, his head tilted. “Look, we’re both stressed. We’ve been driving for almost twenty hours and people are trying to kill us.”
“I know that, you don’t have to tell me!” It felt good to yell.
“If you pull over, we can see if there’s damage to the car,” Mike said, his voice gentle. “Maybe some wires shorted out and that’s why the motor stopped when you turned on the lights.”
Mike was making perfect sense, but Leon didn’t want him to. He wanted Mike to be wrong so he could yell more. He took a deep breath, then slowly pressed the brakes and pulled over. “I’m hungry,” he said, hanging onto the steering wheel for support. “I can’t remember when we last ate. I’m tired. This trip was a bad idea.”
“We’ll buy some food,” Mike said, getting out of the car. Leon followed him to the front.
The bumper, hood, and fenders were crumpled, and a mess of wires protruded through the hole where one of the headlights had been.
“Well, there’s the problem,” Mike said, and started to laugh.
“Why are you laughing?” Leon asked. He tried to take a deep breath, but it caught somewhere in his throat. He wished he could go home and pretend none of this had happened.
“If I don’t laugh, I’m gonna cry,” Mike said. “We’re just going to have to drive in the dark until we get somewhere with food. Here, look at my head before we lose all the light. There’s a first aid kit in the trunk. If you patch me up, I’ll drive.”
Ten minutes later they were on the road again, driving with the last remnants of dusk. Leon couldn’t watch Mike drive in near dark. He closed his eyes and slowly drifted off.
When Mike woke him up later, Leon was disoriented and lightheaded. He felt disconnected from his body, but when he moved sharp pains lanced through his neck and back. The double crash hours earlier had messed him up. He slowly realized they were parked a hundred feet from a convenience store.
“You have any payment cards?” Mike asked.
“No, why?”
“Because one of us is going to have to go in and get food. We were stupid. We should have gotten anonymous payment cards before we left DC. Now one of us will have to pay with our ID.”
Leon looked around, but couldn’t see anything but the blacktop, stars, and store. “How far are we from Austin?”
“Three and a half hours if we keep up our current pace.”
Leon looked up the time in his implant: 2:10am. “I’ll go.”
“You sure?” Mike looked concerned.
“Yeah, I’m really freaking hungry.”
“Fine. Get me some coffee and food. Painkillers.” Mike rubbed his neck. “And payment cards while you’re at it.”
Leon nodded, then walked in. He shielded his eyes from the harsh lights, and rushed around the store picking up what they needed. He grabbed hot prepared food, trying not to think about what it was made of. At the counter, a heavily tattooed teenager with closed eyes ignored him, rapid twitching giving away that he must be gaming through his implant.
Leon called out loud, and the clerk gradually focused on him. He scanned the stuff on the counter, carelessly slid it into bags, and took Leon’s ID for payment, all in thirty seconds, and disappeared back into his game. Leon shook his head, bewildered by the surreal encounter even as he was grateful for the lack of attention, and carried two bags back out to the car. He got in, and Mike pulled away before he’d even shut his door. Leon handed over a cup of coffee and Mike swore as he burnt his tongue. Then Leon pulled out burritos. Five minutes later, Mike declared, “That was the worst thing I ever ate,” as he put an empty wrapper on the seat next to him.
Leon nodded. “I’m not even sure it qualifies as food.” He folded up the empty wrappers and turned to Mike. “We’re in a heap of trouble.”
“We just have to make it to Austin, then we’ll be OK.”
Leon swallowed. There was an awful lot riding on an unknown, super-powerful AI being willing to help and protect them.
22
Tony looked up from his udon noodles, beef skewers, and grilled rice. Slim was staring at him. “What?”
“You eat a lot, you know that?” Slim nursed his whiskey. A half-eaten bowl of ramen with eggs sat in front of him.
“I gotta keep up my energy.” The sounds of more food being grilled came from the kitchen. It smelled like pork belly. “We have to find the girl or the boss is gonna be pissed.”
It was their third day in LA, and they hadn’t found anything yet.
“She’s a slippery one,” Slim said. “There’s too many pawn shops to figure out where she’s selling the diamonds. Maybe she left LA.”
Tony shook his head. “Adam would know.”
“How would he know? He’s disconnected from the rest of the world. He put up that firewall so none of the other AI would discover him.”
“That’s why we bring him the memories, you idiot.” Tony looked out the window. If he hadn’t killed that family in the hit and run, where would he be now? Not sitting here with Slim.
“But we’ve brought him memories from what, six hundred people?” Slim picked at the ramen with his chopsticks, but let the food drop back into the bowl. “How can he know everything in the world from that?”
“I don’t know,” Tony said. “He’s a thousand times smarter than any other AI, a million times smarter than a person. He can do things like that. It’s called interpolation.”
Slim looked up at him, disbelieving, but said nothing.
“This girl must be messing with security cameras and stuff if there’s no record of her.”
Slim sucked down the last of his whiskey. “Yeah, so?”
“We have to forget about finding her digitally by ID. She’s hiding from the cops, so she’s had to disguise herself, so we can forget about spotting her by appearance. That leaves only behavior. Pull up the file from Adam again.”
Slim pulled out his handheld computer with a sigh and placed it on the table between them. “We’ve been through all this.” He scrolled through the data on Catherine with flicks of his finger through the air.